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The Diplodocus

I have had my imagination deeply thrilled lately by reading about the
discovery in America of the bones of a fossil animal called the
_Diplodocus_. I hardly know what the word is derived from, but it
might possibly mean an animal which _takes twice as much_, of
nourishment, perhaps, or room; either twice as much as is good for it,
or twice as much as any other animal. In either case it seems a
felicitous description. The creature was a reptile, a gigantic toad or
lizard that lived, it is calculated, about three million years ago. It
was in Canada that this particular creature lived. The earth was then
a far hotter place than now; a terrible steaming swamp, full of rank
and luxuriant vegetation, gigantic palms, ferns as big as trees. The
diplodocus was upwards of a hundred feet long, a vast inert creature,
with a tough black hide. In spite of its enormous bulk its brain was
only the size of a pigeon's egg, so that its mental processes must have
been of the simplest. It had a big mouth full of rudimentary teeth, of
no use to masticate its food, but just sufficing to crop the luxuriant
juicy vegetable stalks on which it lived, and of which it ate in the
course of the day as much as a small hayrick would contain. The
poisonous swamps in which it crept can seldom have seen the light of
day; perpetual and appalling torrents of rain must have raged there,
steaming and dripping through the dim and monstrous forests, with their
fallen day, varied by long periods of fiery tropical sunshine. In this
hot gloom the diplodocus trailed itself about, eating, eating; living a
century or so; loving, as far as a brain the size of a pigeon's egg can
love, and no doubt with a maternal tenderness for its loathly
offspring. It had but few foes, though, in the course of endless
generations, there sprang up a carnivorous race of creatures which seem
to have found the diplodocus tender eating. The particular diplodocus
of which I speak probably died of old age in the act of drinking, and
was engulfed in a pool of the great curdling, reedy river that ran
lazily through the forest. The imagination sickens before the thought
of the speedy putrefaction of such a beast under such conditions; but
this process over, the creature's bones lay deep in the pool.

Another feature of the earth at that date must have been the vast
volcanic agencies at work; whole continents were at intervals submerged
or uplifted. In t